LVMCI: Efficient and Effective VM Live Migration Selection Scheme in Virtualized Data Centers

Abstract

Virtualization can provide significant benefits in virtualized data centers by enabling efficient and effective live migration to ensure service level agreement(SLA). Most of existing studies make decision on which bad virtual machines (VMs) should be migrated to which appropriate physical machines (PMs) in terms of resource utilizations. However, migration actions may degrade migrated application performance due to extra CPU and bandwidth consumptions. Furthermore, negative performance interferences amongst applications scheduled to the same PM may arise given the poor performance isolations of VMs on a PM. We design and implement a VM migration selection system with less migration costs and application performance interferences, called LVMCI (Live Virtual machine Migration with less Costs and application Interference). We propose a migration cost evaluation model to analyze quantitatively the aspects (i.e. throughput and response latency) of application performance degradation. Dirty rate and frequent dirty rate are two key factors that affect iteration time and downtime. We implement a tool that measures these parameters before VMs are migrated. We distinguish the performance degradation of migrated applications caused by memory iteration phase and stop-and-copy phase, which helps to select VM migrated. Besides that, we propose a performance interference model which helps to select the destination PM. The experimental results show that our system can estimate memory iteration time and downtime with high accuracy, and ensures a high level of SLAs by minimizing performance degradation during migration process and performance interference among co-located VMs at the destination PM.